Pat Pflieger

“When I told [Lily Rowan] I wouldn't be able to make it to the Polo Grounds tomorrow, she began to call Wolfe names, and thought of several new ones that showed her wide experience and fine feeling for words.”
― Rex Stout, Before Midnight

“The jury, having swallowed at one nauseating gulp the business of viewing the body, had settled into their places with that air of conscious importance and simulated modesty which belongs to those initiated into a mystery.”
― Josephine Tey, The Man in the Queue

“Never hit a man with a closed fist," he told her. He could feel her pulse.

"Why? Because it gives you an excuse to manhandle me?"

He let go. "Slap his face instead."

"Ha."

"It will make him take you less seriously, and then he won't be expecting it when you knee him in the groin.”
― Courtney Milan, The Governess Affair

“An untutored observer would focus on the Duke of Clermont, apparently in full command, resplendent in a waistcoat so shot with gold thread that it almost hurt the eyes. This observer would dismiss Hugo Marshall, arrayed as he was in clothing spanning the spectrum from brown to browner. The comparison wouldn’t stop at clothing. The duke was respectably bulky without running to fat; his patrician features were sharp and aristocratic. He had mobile, ice-blue eyes that seemed to take in everything. Compared with Hugo’s own unprepossessing expression and sandy brown hair, the untutored observer would have concluded that the duke was in charge.

The untutored observer, Hugo thought, was an idiot.”
― Courtney Milan, The Governess Affair